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We've seen lots of Ruby feature requests about converting an Enumerable to a Hash: to_h, map_hash, map_to, each_with_hash, etc. Let's look at one common, simple case of this.

Building a key/value mapping from a collection of keys is awkward. We commonly see Hash[*collection.map { |element| [element, calculate(element)] }] or collection.each_with_object({}) { |element, hash| hash[element] = calculate(element) }. Both are verbose. They require boilerplate code that's not relevant to the programmer's intent: to associate an enumerable of keys with calculated values.

Ruby has the idea of an association already: a key and value paired together. It's used by Array#assoc to look up a value from a list of pairs and by Hash#assoc to return a key/value pair. Building up a mapping of key/value pairs is associating keys with values.

So! Consider Enumerable#associate which builds a mapping by associating keys with values:

@aprescott, I think the idea is to only check block_given? once, even if that requires a more verbose method. Checking it once per iteration would give lower performance. But also note that this will probably be rewritten in C :)